Listening recently to the creators of the ice-cream brand, I was struck by how unusual it is to hear executives talking so freely about business as a spiritual practice.

"Remember, there is a spiritual aspect to business just as there is to the lives of individuals," says Jerry Greenfield.

Ben Cohen adds: "As you give you receive, as you help others you are helped in return, as your business supports the community, the community supports your business."

This can come across as saccharine but they are not alone in building a successful business on these core principles.

Just look at the John Lewis Partnership, whose purpose is the "happiness of its staff…and good service to the general community."

The vision of global engineering and design firm Arup is still framed by its founder Sir Ove Arup who sought a balance between being a humane organisation, providing social usefulness via straight and honourable dealings, while providing reasonable prosperity to its members.

"The trouble with money is that it is a dividing force, not a uniting force," he wrote. "If we let it divide us, we are sunk as an organisation – at least as a force for good."

Of course, it's not just the big firms. There are thousands of social enterprises, co-ops and mutuals based on the principles of social and ecological responsibility.

But these companies are still swamped by the numbers of companies still hooked on a system that puts profits above all else.

One key reason for our current mess is that, as we lost sight of the core values of collaboration and community, the ego took over and that little devil on our shoulder started watering the seeds of individualism and greed.

That voice of separation is the one that encouraged bankers to lap up their millions despite the fact that, as a result of their actions, millions are now struggling to get by.

It's not so surprising that groups of testosterone-charged men locked together in dealing rooms, feeling the power of the world at their fingertips, would forget about their responsibilities to the poor and marginalised.

Of course, in the developed world, we are all at some level guilty as charged. How would each of us behave differently if we were joined by an African subsistence farmer and an indigenous tribesman forced off his land in the Amazon to make way for soy or palm oil plantations on every shopping trip?

Rainforest Alliance President Tensie Whelan speaks eloquently about how the global economic system has generated a sense of disconnection and that, if we are going to change our ways, we need to build closer relationships between those who produce goods and those who consume them.

Our collective anger at the bankers is, perhaps in some way, a projection of our own powerlessness against the system we have all helped to create and foster. High levels of depression, mental illness and addiction, hiding just below the veneer of our so-called sophisticated consumer society, are testament to the feelings of loneliness and suffering caused by our high levels of disconnection.

Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh writes in his book on ecology, "The World we Have", how "we have constructed a system we can't control. It imposes itself on us, and we become its slaves and victims. We are so caught up in our own immediate problems that we cannot afford to be aware of what is going on with the rest of the human family or our planet Earth."

Many of us would be a lot more content, I suspect, if we were able to express our values in the workplace but a culture that remains focused on profit maximisation can make that very difficult.

"I think business leaders are afraid of their shareholders and that they will come across as softies and not diligent enough to just concentrate on the profit," he says. "It's a bit of a boys club syndrome of just being a tough guy and not being seen as sentimental. In the IKEA environment it was OK to talk about this because of the culture and values."

While traditional business models need to take their social and ecological responsibilities more seriously, social businesses increasingly recognise the need to become more competitive.

I chaired a roundtable discussion the other day on values hosted by Guardian Sustainable Business in association with Ben & Jerry's. What struck me was the feeling in the room that doing good should not, as Dahlvig points out, be mistaken for being soft, and that employees of social businesses can revel in being both compassionate and tough.

Solitaire Townsend, a founder director of sustainability communications agency Futerra, illustrated this by quoting a recent television episode of Sherlock: "I may be on the side of angels, but don't for one minute mistake me for one."

The Peoples' Supermarket CEO Kate Bull, spoke of the need for fearlessness and that people with strong intrinsic values should be able to go head to head with any tooth and claw capitalist, and come out on top.

"For us, we've always stated from day one that we're here to make a profit. It's what we do with the profit that makes a difference," she says.

The ending of the age of greed and the breakdown of the current capitalist model offers a historic opportunity to reassess the purpose of business and to find a way to navigate a path to a system where social justice and commercial success are not seen as polar opposites.

Values are very personal, however, and so it is for each and every one of us to reflect on the foundation stones of our common humanity and how we can further integrate our dualistic beliefs.